I Don’t Know What Regular People Hear

There's a very old and common thought experiment that most people have thought about at some point in their life. It goes a little something like, “I wonder if the color I see as green is what you see as red.” It's a fun thought experiment because it's ultimately an unanswerable question, and it hints at something deeper. The question we're really asking is, “Is my experience of the world the same as your experience of the world?”

There was a moment when we were recording the score for I Still Know What You Did Last Summer when I realized the answer is no. We are never having the same experiences.

A lot of times when a film score is being recorded by an orchestra the composer will conduct. But, a lot of times they will hire a conductor. There are a couple of reasons why a composer might choose to hire a conductor on a recording session. Some of them want to sit next to the conductor in the “live room” with the orchestra and really focus on what they're hearing without having to worry about communicating with the players while they're playing. Some composers would rather sit in the “control room”, a separate room where the recording engineer sits in front of speakers and monitors the recording, because ultimately they are responsible for what the music sounds like coming out of the speakers, not what it sounds like in the room with the orchestra. The energy of all the players in the room is exciting and a live orchestra always makes everything sound beautiful and that can be misleading. Some of them simply don't know how to conduct an orchestra. But the most valuable thing a film orchestra conductor brings, the primary reason most people want one, is their ears. Having another set of ears to help make sure everything is perfect is invaluable and these conductors have superhuman ears. They can hear what every single instrument is playing and connect what they're hearing in real time with what they're seeing on the page. They can then instantly provide critical insight on how the individual musicians can change their performances to make the entire orchestra sound better.

John Frizzell, the composer for I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and my boss at the time, had hired Pete Anthony to be the conductor on that score. Before the recording session, we were going over the scores with Pete one piece of music at a time, to make sure he didn't have any questions and that he had what he needed. In one of the pieces of music, John had written this little moment where, after the cue had ended and the strings were holding out the last chord, the violas just subtly played a few notes from the theme of the movie. Pete saw that and joked, "There's one for the music majors in the audience." John laughed, but I didn't get the joke. "Do you really think regular people don't hear that?" I asked him. And he responded, "I don't know what regular people hear."

He was right. All three of us had spent years learning how to deconstruct a piece of music into its pieces. Orchestration, chord progressions, harmonies, melodies, bass lines, inner voices versus outer voices, all of these and dozens of other little bits and pieces add up, in a musician’s mind, to make a piece of music. And I, along with many other musicians, hear music as a sum total of those bits and pieces. But most people don't. Most people hear a piece of music as a single thing, a piece of music.

I can't do that anymore, and honestly, I miss it. I don't think it's true for all musicians. I think some musicians can turn that analytical part of their brain on and off and just experience the piece of music the way most people get to. But I can't do that. I'm always hearing details of production and orchestration and harmonies. The older I get and the better I get as a musician, the more of those details I can hear and the further deconstructed the listening experience becomes.

I'm not complaining. It's a good thing. I have way more avenues to find joy in music now. I can obviously still feel all the emotion in music, the way any human can, and I can also experience all the intellectual pleasures of brilliant songwriting and brilliant production. It's no better or worse than the way non-musicians experience music, but it is different and it took a lot of learning, practice and time.

I don't think that necessarily means my brown could be your purple. But I do think it means a visual artist looks at color differently than I do, even if they're seeing the same colors. I do think it means a structural engineer experiences driving over a bridge differently than I do even sitting in the same car. Once you realize that who you are and what you know and where you've been and what you bring to the table affect how you experience every experience you have, then you have to accept that even in exactly the same circumstances, everyone else is truly having their own different experiences.

This “experience gap” affects every relationship in your life. Every casual conversation, every business meeting, every deep moment shared between two lovers. No matter how intimate your encounter with another person, you're never having the same experience. You can’t ever have the same experience. Sadly, that gap that always exists between us, even in our most intimate moments, is the primary cause of misunderstandings. It's the reason you have to hear both sides of any story to try to piece together what really happened. And it's the reason why, almost every time, whatever the story, whoever is telling it is the good guy.

It's easy to feel despair about that gap. But, like any gap, it is an opportunity to build connections. It can be very humbling to recognize that often the other person's side of the story isn't wrong, they legitimately had a different experience than you. Once you truly internalize that fact, and the existence of that experience gap becomes a part of your internal narrative, it becomes a lot harder to blame other people for having a different perspective no matter how contrary it is to yours.

“Put yourself in the other person’s shoes” is advice we have all gotten and probably even given to someone at some point. But that kind of empathy, especially when things are contentious, is a lot easier said than done because you already have a narrative of what happened. In your story, they behaved in a way you wouldn’t have. In your mind reconciliation lies not in you having changed anything, but in them having acted differently or drawn a different conclusion than they did. When you put yourself in their shoes, you imagine you would have done something different than they did and that doesn’t actually get you any closer together. 

There’s a method you can use to help close that gap. You can’t modify your own belief about “what really happened” as easily as you can tell yourself a new story. So the secret to closing the experience gap is something I call “narrative replacement.” Imagine a totally different experience. Tell yourself, in your mind, a different story with a totally different set of characters. Tell yourself a story where whatever the other person is claiming happened to them happens to you. 

Let’s take a simple common example. Your friend thinks you excluded her on purpose and from your perspective that never happened. Human nature at that moment is to deny the allegation, to try to correct her narrative. “I would never exclude you. I love you” might be the first thing that pops into your mind to say. You then seek evidence to support your narrative, “I called you last week twice and left a message.” This approach, while feeling like a justified expression of your love for your friend, does nothing to close the experience gap. It just shines a light on it.

The traditional “putting yourself in their shoes” is equally unhelpful. It’s easy to imagine that had you received those phone calls you would have called back, or interpreted them differently. It’s easy to imagine your story from their side and that’s not closing the gap at all, it’s actually furthering your own narrative that they could have and probably should have acted or interpreted events differently.

The secret is not to try to accept their narrative as a replacement for yours, but employ “narrative replacement” and imagine a totally different event. In this new story you are actually excluded by your friends. In this new story you play their role and a totally different person plays yours. You will never truly believe that you excluded them. Their story won’t feel true no matter what character you pretend to inhabit in retelling it. But you can easily accept this new story as an independent narrative.

Narrative replacement works because imagining their story, which feels like a fiction to you, replacing yours, which feels like reality, is almost impossible. Imagining a totally different story where your friends actually exclude you is simple.

How did you react in that new story? Is it really that far from how they reacted now? What could the characters in your new story do to help you? Can you do any of those things in this situation? 

Once you practice and get good at reacting not to the story your brain tells you about what “actually happened” but to the story you are choosing to tell yourself, then you've done basically all the work of crossing that gap. And the beautiful thing is that what lies on the other side is understanding. Not just understanding the other person’s side, but often understanding yourself better. The gift you give yourself when creating a narrative truly based on the other person’s experience, is that you get to see yourself from the outside. A view you aren't ever truly privy to.